One Practical Way To Boost Your Twitter Reach

by George Konetes | Mar 1, 2012 | Digital

There seems to be an endless supply of tweets, ebooks, blog posts, and articles with key principles of using Twitter more effectively. But of all the content out there, I only rarely come across something that meets these three criteria: Novel, Doable, and Effective. And increasing your twitter reach by positioning yourself as a primary source is something that meets all three conditions.

Today I’d like to talk about just one way to improve your Twitter reach. Sure you could find 12 keys or 21 principles, but this one way is actually Novel, Doable, and Effective. I’ve used this method first hand to grow reach and get more legitimate and engaged followers. What’s even better is that it harmonizes with the best practices guide and is actually helpful. And of course it’s a five step process to do this one thing.

First you want to think about what topics within your area of content expertise are hot and trendy. If it takes you more than 2 minutes to do this then it’s not your area of content expertise.

Second, do a Google blog search using a handful of those trendy keywords, be fairly specific.

Third, set the time specs to “Last Hour” and find the most valuable post or two that you can. If there is a lot of good content then change the time specs to “Past 10 minutes”. Likewise if there are no good search results then expand the time frame to “Past 24 hours”. Your goal here is to find the newest trendy and valuable blog post possible.

The fourth step is tweet it with a byline that involves immediacy such as Hot off the presses, fresh blog post, new insights, or whatever you feel is appropriate.

The fifth step, which is critical and somewhat controversial, include the appropriate hashtags to make the content easier to find. Don’t just pile on hashtags, but use the right ones. So for this blog post I might use #SocialMedia, #Twitter, and #SMO. If three hashtags is more than your constitution can bear then use two or just one. But you need some hashtags for this to work.

What you are effectively doing is making yourself one of the first sources of this new content on twitter. And by using the right hashtags, you are moving it straight into the discussion. The reason this works is no secret. People like content and they like new content. If you are the first one to share something new and valuable then you are seen as a primary source and are more likely to get people’s attention.

A lot of people tweet links that someone else tweets, but there are far fewer who are supplying brand new valuable content to the stream. If you were one of those people in my content area, I’d follow you.

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